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Here is an article a friend emailed me with other popup blockers.
Firms vie to help you find your PC files
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff | June 14, 2004
Afew years back, when home computers first started sporting huge 100-gigabyte hard drives, people wondered what anybody would do with all that data storage space. Well, now we know. People store their e-mails, their financial documents, copies of favorite Web pages every sort of data you can think of.
And often, they'll never see the stuff again, because they can't remember where they put it.
The Internet contains millions of times the data found on any desktop hard drive. But it's usually easier to find files on the Internet, because so many entrepreneurs and inventors have tackled the problem. Their efforts have given us websites like Yahoo and Google and many others where we can plow through hundreds of terabytes of information in seconds.
But not many companies have targeted the desktop search market, because the desktop belongs to Microsoft Corp. Microsoft created the Windows operating system that nearly all of us use, and that gives Microsoft an instant advantage in devising a hard drive search tool. It's hard to justify making a big investment in a desktop search product, when Microsoft can respond by building one of its own and folding it into the operating system just as it did with Web browsers.
Indeed, Microsoft has long included a search feature in Windows. Alas, it stinks. Try running a search for a file with a particular word in it. Your PC may chug away for a good half-hour, and you still might not find it. The Windows XP operating system claimed to improve the process with software that creates an index of the drive, much as Google indexes the Internet. But the indexer uses so much computer power that other programs limp rather than run. Looking for a simple way to make a Windows XP computer run faster? Turn off file indexing. You'll think you've bought a new computer.
But you'll still need help finding those missing files. Microsoft realizes this, and plans to add an efficient desktop search feature to the next version of Windows, set to appear in 2006. But Microsoft won't stop there. It's planning a search tool that seamlessly includes desktop and Internet search in the same interface. In other words, a Googlekiller. For who will keep going to Google, when the same service is built right onto their computer's desktop?
Google and the other search companies have 18 months to prepare for the Microsoft onslaught, and they've settled on an aggressive response. If Microsoft wants to raid their Internet search stronghold, the search companies will lay siege to Microsoft's desktop. They'll begin offering software to let computer users scour their own hard drives as easily as they hunt for new Web logs.
It's hardly a new idea. In the mid-1990s, when AltaVista was the hottest search engine on the Web, it offered a piece of software that generated an index of the user's computer files. The software was free, and it was good. Too bad the company that spawned it, Digital Equipment Corp. of Maynard, fell on hard times, or AltaVista's search tool might be on every desktop today.
Never mind. Suddenly there are lots of other companies vying for the position. Last week, the second-tier search service Ask Jeeves purchased a small company called Tukaroo, which has developed desktop search software. Last month, The New York Times reported that Google is developing its own personal search program, codenamed ‘‘Puf- fin.''
But both companies have been beaten to the draw by Terra Lycos, the Spanish-owned Internet search company with US operations based in Waltham. Terra Lycos has teamed up with Argo Technology Inc., a Newton software firm, to create a free utility that does a decent job of hunting up missing files.
Terra Lycos owns HotBot, a service that allows users to check several major search engines. Now it's offering the HotBot Desktop Edition as a free download at www.hotbot. com/tools/desktop. The Desktop Edition is a toolbar that attaches to the top edge of Microsoft's Web browser, just like the popular Google toolbar. HotBot includes a pop-up blocker that works like Google's, and it lets you run quick Internet searches as well.
But the coolest feature is desktop search. You have to turn it on when you first install the toolbar: The software needs to know when to create the index, and which files you want indexed. You can tell it to go through the My Documents folder, or to do the entire hard drive. It only indexes certain types of files, but they're the types that matter most Microsoft Outlook e-mails, Microsoft Word documents, Adobe Acrobat files, PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, plain old text.
The indexer works in the background; expect it to take a few hours when you first run it. The software ran so efficiently on an old Globe computer that other functions didn't suffer. And once the indexing was done, it took about four seconds to find 167 indexed documents containing the word ‘‘spam.'' Not bad for a freebie.
Indeed, the HotBot program measures up well against a costly alternative called X1. This $99 program, available for a free test at www.x1.com, delivers blazing fast searches, with results that pop up even as you type in the word. But the extra performance isn't worth a C-note.
Soon there will be no hope of charging for desktop search software, with Terra Lycos, Google, Ask Jeeves, and Microsoft all doling out freebies. They all have ulterior motives, of course. They'll drag your eyeballs to their Internet search sites, and try to sell you stuff. But at least they'll help you find the stuff you already have.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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